A shameless woman constantly acts disgracefully is literally “A shameless woman wears out shame.” Translations interpret this in a variety of ways. The rendering of Good News Translation (similarly New Jerusalem Bible) is hard to accept. A better model is “An immodest woman [eventually] loses any sense of shame.”

But a modest daughter will even be embarrassed before her husband: In Greek the word translated modest is built from the same root as the word rendered shameless in the first line. Daughter is literal, but will be misleading, since the focus is on the woman’s place as wife; the writer may be thinking of a young bride. Good News Translation offers a good translation of this line, and so does Contemporary English Version with “but a good woman is modest, even alone with her husband.”

Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Sirach. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2008. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.